250 Million Tablets Will Be Sold in 2013

Tablet computers are growing so fast that it looks like 2014 or 2015 will be the year sales of tablets eclipse sales of PCs.

Here are NPD Displaysearch’s projections for sales of tablet and notebook PCs (multiply the left scale by 1,000). Pay attention to the blue bars.

Now compare those numbers to IDC’s projections for PC sales through 2017 (multiply the left scale by 1,000,000).

With PC sales hovering around 350 million units for the next few years, and tablet sales shooting above 400 million by 2015, it appears the tipping point at which tablets become the planet’s dominant personal computing device is nigh.